My Real Life Encounter with a Tortured Ghost

We have all been there, all alone with the sense that someone or something might reach out and pull us into oblivion. Our blood runs cold. We pick up the pace to get into the light. We run, knowing that as soon as we get within a few feet of being visible to people who know us, that we must get it together, lest they discover our silliness. We sleep with nightlights. We run fans while we sleep to drown out the eerie sounds that the house makes while we sleep. The darkness is not our friend. This is the story of the ghost that used to live in my upstairs hallway. I was the only one that ever felt the ghost, and my family thought I was nuts. It turns out that there were reasons for that.

I never saw the ghost in my hallway. I simply sensed that she was there. I knew it, and I made a habit of turning the hallway light on simply to walk to the other end (more like power walking) where I would make sure to turn the bedroom light on, and stepping safely inside before reaching a hand around the corner into the hall to find the 2^nd switch to the hallway light, and rushing my hand back to my side, glancing over my shoulder to be sure the ghost wasn't reaching for me. I just knew she was reaching out to grab me.

The ghost in my house was a girl, about 6-7 years old in a long white nightie. She was tortured and sad and crying. Mind you, I never saw her, and I never even heard her, but I knew these things about her. I wasn't sure how I knew, but I did know it. Several weeks after moving into the house and after I already knew the ghost existed, I heard a story about a murder that had taken place in the area. A young girl's body had been found in the bushes at the school yard, not 300 yards from my home. Police had come to the conclusion that the girl had been dumped there, but killed elsewhere. They had never found the murder weapon, or the original crime scene. My house had not been built yet when the little girl was murdered, but I wondered often whether the geographic location of my hallway had been the location where the little girl from our town had been murdered.